A district court judge has ruled that Grubhub properly classified a California delivery driver as an independent contractor
not employees—judge rules
Context & Ripple Effects
This ruling closes out a case that has been building since DoorDash and GrubHub were sued over contractor classification in 2015, with the Grubhub trial argued last fall as a potential template for how gig companies define employment. A district court judge has now sided with Grubhub: the California delivery driver was properly an independent contractor, not an employee.
It is an early courtroom win for the on-demand model at a moment when the classification question is splintering by jurisdiction — the NLRB would later reach the same conclusion for Uber drivers, while New York courts have gone the other way.
First-order effects
- Grubhub escapes the cost of reclassifying its California delivery fleet as employees — wages, benefits, and payroll overhead it would have owed had the driver's claim succeeded.
- The verdict hands every gig platform facing similar suits a concrete judicial data point arguing that contractor status can survive scrutiny when the worker controls their schedule.
Second-order effects
- Rivals like Uber and DoorDash, sued over the same issue, can now cite a federal district court ruling in their defense rather than litigating from scratch.
- Plaintiffs' lawyers are pushed toward friendlier jurisdictions — New York, where the state's highest court later found Postmates drivers are employees because the company 'could not operate' without them — instead of betting on California federal courts.
Third-order effects
- With courts splitting by state, the industry's endgame shifts from litigation to legislation and ballot measures — the path California ultimately took when its Supreme Court upheld Prop 22, letting Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash keep classifying drivers as contractors.
- Worker classification hardens into a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction patchwork, where the same driver can be an employee in one state and a contractor in another depending on which court or ballot box decides.
The trend: Gig worker classification is being settled jurisdiction by jurisdiction — through district court rulings, agency memos, and ballot measures — rather than by any single national standard.